A key focus of this blog is the history of Jacksons in Ireland. I am specially curious about those who may be related to Sir Thomas Jackson (1841-1915). His life is key to understanding how a dozen or so young men, sons of Irish tenant farmers, shaped the future of international banking in the Far East in the late 1800s. I also use this blog as a place for playful posts: book and restaurant reviews, recipes, and events in my life. WARNING: Note the date of each post. Some may be outdated.

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Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Cavananore, a townland of some 219 acres in Co. Louth, was occupied
at least as early as the late 1600s by a Presbyterian family named Coulter.
They were supposedly awarded the land for their valour at the Battle of the
Boyne on the side of King William. The land stayed in my family thanks to the
will of an Andrew Coulter of Cavananore who died in 1775. His sister, Barbara Coulter
(1721-1795), married John Bradford (1705-1789) and their twin sons were
executors of Andrew’s will. This is the easy part to follow.

The complicated parts came after Andrew’s death when the initial seeds of a multi-generational
family feud were sown. It seems to have started with a land division between
John & Barbara’s twin sons: Thomas Bradford (1739-1790) & Samuel
Bradford (1739-1818). In the generations that succeeded them, the feud between the two branches of the family became
almost biblical.

An early complication was the untimely death of Thomas
Bradford in 1790. He mucked things up, as my ancestors often did, by dying before he got his affairs in order. In his case, he died intestate, five days before Christmas. His only son and
youngest child, Andrew Coulter Bradford, was just 2 years old., and Andrew’s older sister,
Elizabeth - my g-g-g grandmother, would have been about 4 or 5 years old. Elizabeth, their mother,
was 32 years old when she was widowed, and had five young children clinging to her skirts. The
eldest child was only 8 years old.

Nine years after the death of Thomas Bradford, an agreement defined what portion was due to his widow; how much to the widow of Thomas’
brother-in-law, John Coulter (d. 1774); and also how much of the land and rents
were to go to Thomas’ surviving twin, Samuel. In this agreement, rents were to
be divvied up when they became due in November, as was the custom. Robert Dickie
& John Bailie, a couple of neighbours who were probably also trustees , were
to oversee the distribution. However, in such legal matters, the devil is often
in the details.

Even though it would be way more fun to let my imagination
run riot over all this, I should be careful not to overstate the consequences. At
least no one was killed in this dispute, at least as far as I know. For
example, it wasn’t as bad as the feuds between the daughters of King Lear, a
play about land division and lousy governance if there ever was one. What it
did share with the plot of King Lear was the entanglement of countless plots,
subplots and counter-plots.

I suspect that envy first divided the two branches of the
family when the relative values of the lands on either side of the dividing
line became uneven, probably as a result of the hard work and skills of Andrew
Coulter Bradford (1788-1847). Andrew was
the only son of Thomas, and therefore had inherited the land on the easterly
side of the boundary after the death of his father in 1790.

A couple of decades later, in 1809, the main residence on Andrew’s
side of the townland was the style of house common to farmers in the area, and was probably the one he was born in. It was a
thatched single story bungalow. We know this because he signed an agreement, presumably
because he had just turned 21, to take care of his mother and the unmarried
sisters who lived with them. This included the helpful description of their
home: The House to be Thatched, Tuff
coated and white washed and kept as to its outside wants & repair by him.

An 1827 letter from Capt. Eliezer Birch Gilmore (1762-1834) to
his half sister, Elizabeth Bradford (1758-1844) the widow of Thomas alludes to
the discord that had already deepened in the following couple of decades:

On the other side [of this letter] you have a copy of Andy’s agreement. As I have a
great deal of conversation with him on family matters he can give you every
information on that subject. So soon as I get matters settled respecting this
place I will then be able to determine on our further settlement, at present we
are quite undetermined. That gives me real pleasure to learn that Tom McCullaghhas at last
settled all matters with his Brotherin an amicable
manner.

A decade after this, in 1837, the Field Book surveys and
valuations reveal that the differences between the two halves of the estate had
become considerable.

On the western side of the
boundary, John Bradford (?-1ft 1837), who was the eldest son of Samuel
Bradford (1739-1818) & Margaret Henry (1774-1846), had a house & farm
buildings worth £7.5.0.

On the eastern side,
Andrew Coulter Bradford, the only son of Thomas Bradford shared with his widowed
mother and his sisters a house worth £4.14.0 as well as a house &
offices worth £26.2.0.

Already by this time, Andrew’s valuation is close to four
times the value of the houses on his cousin’s side of the divide.

When Andrew died in 1847, never having married, one portion
of his estate went to his niece Eliza Jackson, the mother of Sir Thomas Jackson.
The land was favourably described in the lawyer’s notes of January 16, 1850:

Cavanore & Anahavackey contain jointly about 100 acres & was
considered quite a model farm so admirably had it been managed by Mr.
Bradford & it was provided with a very fine residence & every
article of the best & most improved description necessary for its
management.

It is hard to say with absolute certainty, at least based on
records found so far, when the current Cavananore House was actually completed.
It was at very least occupied before 1847. A inventory done in 1850 as part of the
probate of Andrew Coulter Bradford’s will describes the contents of a breakfast
parlour, dining room, a drawing room, hallway, 4 bedrooms, a kitchen &
pantry. The 22 stair rods indicate a second story. It would have been considered
a substantial house for that time and place. Most other houses, even those of
reasonably prosperous farmers, were still single story with thatched roofs.

What was it like to be living there at this time? Unsettled,
at best. According to the 1841 census there were 13 houses and 63 people
residing in Cavananore, but in the decade that followed the population dropped by
more than 50%. The 1847 famine came between the two census dates. Not only were
lives and livelihoods lost during the famine, but rents dropped in the
aftermath, and many previously productive farmers could not hold on to their
title. With respect to Cavananore, it was clear there was no longer enough rental income
to pay out the bequests of Andrew Coulter Bradford’s will, at least not in
the way that they had been stipulated and then interpreted by his trustees.

The front part of the original house remains high on a hill
with a commanding view of the countryside. At some point, at least by 1854, it was
an L-shaped structure with five windows on one side, and 6 windows on the other.

This is where it gets fun to compare contemporary pictures
with old maps. Here is a sketch I did of the outline of the house and
outbuildings as compiled from a range of estate maps from the time of Griffiths
Valuation in 1854. The house is in red, the enclosed garden in light green,
farm buildings in yellow. The portion
that I have coloured in brown was where I suspect that the original thatched bungalow
stood:

Here is a sketch where I try to imagine the shape of the
house, based on merging the look of the contemporary photo of the house with
the mid-1850s maps, coupled with information in the 1901 census (as you can
see, my artistic talents did not progress past elementary school):

Two events, one of destruction and one of construction, explain
why the 1854 map shows the house to be L-shaped while the 1985 picture (at the top of this page) shows a T-shaped
house. The destructive event was an extensive fire started by the IRA which destroyed
the back section on the right hand side. They set the fire because there was a rumour that the Black and Tans,
their arch foes, were about to set up camp there, and they sought to pre-empt this. According
to some accounts, the Black and Tans had no such plan. For now, I cannot verify either
account. Later, what remained of the house did end up being a place used by the
IRA, another one of those twists of fate
particular to this region.

The addition that looks like a stub of the T at the back of the house in the 1985 photograph
was added in the early 1950s when amenities such as running water, electricity
and indoor toilets were added. Before then, Annie Lynch, the widow who lived
there with her four boys, had to go to the village for batteries to run the
radio. Everything else was run by people power. Her son has told me that the water
was pumped, and the lavatory was outside the house in a stone walled structure
known as The Sugar House. Clearly the
connotation is different than what it would be in Canada where a sugar shack is where maple sugar is made.

If we could time travel back a 150 years or so, we would see
Andrew Coulter Bradford’s widowed mother and maiden sisters and nieces living
out their natural days. We would see the frequent visitors from Urker and
Liscalgot and Shortstone and other nearby townlands who stayed overnight. We would also see the grief in 1874 of Thomas
Jackson, the yet-to-be-knighted HSBC banker based in Hong Kong, when his infant
daughter died unexpectedly. She died when he and his young wife were enjoying
their first visit to Ireland since he had left more than a decade earlier. They
were proud to be showing off their young family to their various relations.
Baby Edith Bradford Jackson was only four months old when she died. Her
memorial in the family grave site at Creggan Church is the only Jackson family
memorial that is still legible.

Understanding all of these family dynamics and experiences goes
some distance to explaining why Sir Thomas Jackson retained such a keen
interest in Cavananore well into the 20th Century. It was one of the
many properties in the area adding up to more than 800 acres that he purchased in
his later life and held until his death in 1915. He never returned to live in
Ireland, dying at his desk on Lombard Street in London, but a significant part
of his heart remained with this land and these people - his people. This was
clear right up to the time of his very last posted letter.

SOURCES: There are dozens of sources that buttress the facts in this story. Rather than listing them all, here is a link to a page on my website that I will keep updating: Cavananore

Saturday, May 5, 2012

There are some phrases that I totally dislike hearing.
Always have. Ever since I was a child, the phrase that earned its rightful
place near the top of my personal cringe list was: That’s the way the cookie crumbles. After all, what could be more
disappointing than the crumbs of a cookie when you are so close to having the whole
thing?

Our amazing Cookie Bearer - with a batch of her hazelnut cookies.

The reason for this intro is that right now I could care
less about a crumbled cookie. Instead, my much greater disappointment would be not
scoring two tickets to the Ellen
Degeneres show between May 15th-17th. I desperately want one for
my youngest daughter, the Cookie Bearer, which also means that I need one for The
Moi. She and I are in this gig together.

You see, for Christmas, my husband and I gave her the
present of a weeklong stay at the Best
Western Plus Carriage Inn in Burbank. Our plan was that I would rent a car,
and we would toodle about, and she would be able to visit lots of the places
where movies and TV shows are made. The star attraction that we kept returning
to wanting to see was the Ellen Degeneres show being filmed. How can you beat
that?

As soon as tickets became available for our dates, The
Cookie Bearer walked as fast as she could from her house to ours, which is a little
more than a kilometer, and got my husband to nail down two tickets for us. The
message that completed the transaction said that we would hear about our
tickets within two weeks. After we had passed the two week mark, and heard
nothing, I wrote to the fan web site. Twice.
Still silence. Now, our only resort is the magic number that you call for a limited number of tickets on the day the
show is being taped.

Our daughter is an amazing woman. She turns thirty this
year, and has confounded all the experts who predicted major doom for her when
she was born and diagnosed with CDLS. I will
never forget being told that she would only have a 50/50 chance of living past
the age of two, and that if she did, that she would be profoundly retarded and
autistic. The first years were the hardest, with sleepless nights, failure to
thrive, and hospital stays, but she made it through. With her own gumption
coupled with the support of others, she even graduated from High School.

She now works part-time at Canadian Tire and lives
independently at Roberts Creek
Cohousing where she does volunteer work helping the treasurer by writing
cheques and paying the bills. All of this is part of a big-time miracle. Even
so, it doesn’t mean that life is easy. The nickel and diming of the syndrome
costs her in countless ways on a daily basis. What I admire about her is that she
faces each day, and takes it as it comes. Whenever I fret about something, she
says: Mum, it will all be OK.

Already, in readiness for our holiday, she is checking out
the daily temperatures in Burbank, and planning what to pack. As for me, I will
probably leave all that to the last minute, fling it all together and hope for
the best. Aside from remembering important things like my passport, what I am really
hoping for is one of those minor miracles that will cause her heart to soar. I
really don’t want to hear ... well, you know. (That thing about the cookie.)
Maybe if all our friends send energy into the universe, maybe something will
budge, and then on May 15th(or
16th or 17th) when I dial that magic number, I will hear
a person on the other side say: Two
tickets? Yes. You can pick them up at the door.

Our Cookie Bearer is presiding over a table set with place mats that she made for me for Xmas. Many talents.

PS This piece for my blog has been written by myself, with
helpful editing suggestions made by the aforementioned Cookie Bearer.

About Me

Author And Researcher. I am currently writing a book on the life of Sir Thomas Jackson. He was the son of tenant farmers, born just before the Famine in South Armagh, who was knighted because he not only lead HSBC into the 20th Century, but was also responsible for assisting with the funding of much of the economic development in China & Japan in the late 1800s. My first published book was "Some Become Flowers: Living with Dying at Home".